Israel is supporting an armed group in Gaza that opposes the Palestinian motion Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted after feedback by a former minister that Israel had supplied weapons to it.
Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is a part of an area Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR) assume tank describes Abu Shabab because the chief of a “criminal gang operating in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting aid trucks”.
Knesset member and ex-defense minister Avigdor Lieberman had advised the Kan public broadcaster that the federal government, at Netanyahu’s path, was “giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons”.
“What did Lieberman leak?… That on the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas. What is bad about that?” Netanyahu mentioned in a video posted to social media on Thursday.
“It is only good, it is saving lives of Israeli soldiers.”
Michael Milshtein, an skilled on Palestinian affairs on the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, advised AFP that the Abu Shabab clan was a part of a Bedouin tribe that spans throughout the border between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
Some of the tribe’s members, he mentioned, have been concerned in “all kinds of criminal activities, drug smuggling, and things like that”.
‘Gangster’
Milshtein claimed that Abu Shabab had hung out in jail in Gaza and that his clan chiefs had not too long ago denounced him as an Israeli “collaborator and a gangster”.
“It seems that actually the Shabak (Israeli security agency) or the (military) thought it was a wonderful idea to turn this militia, gang actually, into a proxy, to give them weapons and money and shelter” from military operations, Milshtein mentioned.
He added that Hamas killed 4 members of the gang days in the past.
The ECFR mentioned Abu Shabab was “reported to have been previously jailed by Hamas for drug smuggling. His brother is said to have been killed by Hamas during a crackdown against the group’s attacks on U.N. aid convoys.”
Israel frequently accuses Hamas, with which it has been at struggle for almost 20 months, of looting assist convoys in Gaza.
Hamas mentioned the group had “chosen betrayal and theft as their path” and known as on civilians to oppose them.
Hamas, which has dominated Gaza for almost 20 years, mentioned it had proof of “clear coordination between these looting gangs, collaborators with the occupation (Israel), and the enemy army itself in the looting of aid and the fabrication of humanitarian crises that deepen the suffering of” Palestinians.
The Popular Forces, as Abu Shabab’s group calls itself, mentioned on Facebook it had “never been, and will never be, a tool of the occupation”.
“Our weapons are simple, outdated, and came through the support of our own people,” it added.
Milshtein known as Israel’s choice to arm a bunch akin to Abu Shabab “a fantasy, not something that you can really describe as a strategy”.
“I really hope it will not end with catastrophe,” he mentioned.
Source: www.dailysabah.com